Shining Moon Episode 06: Translations and Writing in English as Your Second Language II

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon: A Speculative Fiction Podcast, Episode 6. Today we’ll continue our series by asking questions about translation and writing in English as your second language. We’ll find out how difficult it is to write in your second (or third) language, what the advantages of writing in another language are, how you deal with reader expectations, and how to go about getting reputable translations for your work.

My guests today are Cecile Cristofari, Jelena Dunato, and Floris Kleijne. Let’s start with some introductions!

Jelena Dunato: Twitter - @jelenawrites, Bluesky - @jelenawrites.bsky.social, Insta - jelena_author

Floris Kleijne: Facebook at floris.kleijne, or at his website: https://www.floriskleijne.com 

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon, a speculative fiction podcast episode 6. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll continue our series by asking questions about translation and writing in English as your second language. Again, like last episode, we'll find out about how difficult it is to write in your second or third or fourth language, what the advantages of writing another language are, how you deal with reader expectations, and how to go about getting reputable translations for your work – which, as I mentioned last time, can be a thing. 

My guests today are Cecile Cristofari, Yelena Dunato, and Floris Kleijne. Let's start with some introductions. 

Cecile Cristofari lives in South France where she teaches literature and writes stories when her children are asleep. Good idea. Her children have appeared in Inner Zone, no, no. Her fiction has appeared in Inner Zone, Daily Science Fiction, Reckoning, and others, and has been long listed for the BSFA Award. Her short story collection, Elephants in Bloom, It's forthcoming from NewCon Press. 

Jelena Dunato is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer, and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade, building a career in the arts. Yelena's stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Future Sci-Fi, and Mermaids Monthly, among others. Her debut novel, Dark Woods Deep Water, is coming out on September 19th from Ghost Orchid Press. She is a member of SWFA and Codex. Jelena lives on an island in the Adriatic with her husband, daughter, and cat. Hello, Yelena, how are you doing today?

Jelena:
Hello, thank you for inviting me, I'm great.

Deborah L. Davitt:
It's lovely to have you on.

Jelena:
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Then finally we have Floris M. Kleijne, who juggles two writing careers while paying the bills with an unrelated day job. In English, he's the author of some 50 speculative fiction stories, some of them award-winning. In Dutch, and without the middle initial, he's an acclaimed thriller writer. In between, he translates. You can find him on Facebook at Floris Kleijne or at his website, www.floriskleijne.com. Hi, Flores, how are you today?

Floris Kleijne:
Hey, hi Deborah. Great to be on the show, thanks.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Right, so we're gonna go ahead and dig right into this. We did an episode last time with Alex Schwartsman and Anatoly Belilovsky talking about similar topics, but I know that some of you do self-translation, which is an entirely different skillset than translating other people's work. And I'm gonna start with sort of picking
on Floris here a little bit, because I know that you do this. How difficult is it to translate yourself?

Floris Kleijne:
Well, the interesting thing is that it's, in my experience, much easier to translate myself than to translate others. I've then done some commercial business translation as well. And then it's translating to order, starting from a text that someone else has created, which in my feeling, in my experience, limits the freedom. And translating my own

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
work, it was very easy to make choices that fit the story better in the second language. I have mostly translated from English to my native Dutch. And I could take great liberties with the text and with the style and with the tone of voice and even with

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
settings and backgrounds that fit better in the Dutch version than the English version. So it went very smoothly. I could basically rewrite the story in Dutch from the English original instead of really sticking closely to the original text.

Deborah L. Davitt:
What was expressed last night when we were doing the episode was, how much do you betray the author? And apparently you betrayed yourself liberally.

Floris Kleijne:
I'd betrayed myself liberally, very much so, but sometimes you can't do anything else because for example, my time travel story, which won the rights of the future, meeting the sculptor in the original, the story requires a moment when somebody travels back in time and recognizes a very important historical moment. And for the original, I took the Gettysburg dress because we know that. You have to quote like... 12 words and everybody knows what it is. And

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
then when I went to Dutch and nobody, but I mean nobody in Holland knows the Gettysburg address.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hehehehe

Floris Kleijne:
The hardest part of that translation was finding a kind of similarly recognizable historical event in Holland and because we're not very patriotic here, there's not much to go on. So on one hand it was a difficult search, on the other hand I could take this liberty because it was my story. So I couldn't. toss out an entire scene and write another one which better fit my local audience.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Alright, that brings up cultural translation and trying to find things that are appropriate or understandable for one audience to another and how many times you wind up having to use footnotes and how many times you try to avoid using footnotes to convey information that might or might not be readily available to your new audience. And I know Cecile, I know that you do translations as well out of French. How do you wind up dealing with this?

Cecile:
With cultural translations, well, it's really on a case-by-case basis. For example, if there is wordplay, sometimes you can translate it, if you're lucky, especially with English and French, since there is so much vocabulary in common. Very often, you can make it work. Every so often you just have to think, for example, okay, these characters are obviously engaged in some kind of banter. So I'm just going to try to choose what to keep.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
For example, let's say I just want to keep the tone. They are, well, there's this banter going on, maybe they are making jokes or playing on words here and there, so maybe I'm going to reach for a place where I... could insert a similar joke or would play. And it's going to lose the original, but the tone on the whole is going to, I'm going to keep that. And when it comes to references. Honestly, usually I prefer to keep the original reference

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
and just trust the readers to figure it out. In some cases, for example, this doesn't really apply to translation, but when I write my own stories, I tend to write stories that take place in, well, in South France and very often on the coasts, on the French Riviera.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
And when it's tried the landscape, Usually, I change a couple of details. For example, there are lots of, in the French Riviera, a very characteristic plant is the agave,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
because it's being produced there, and it's very, well, it looks very spectacular. Except that if you're right, that there are agaves all over the place. I think that many readers, especially North America, are going to assume that this is, taking place in Mexico


Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.


Cecile:
or in the south of the US. So instead, usually I switch, I say I mentioned pines or aloes, even though aloes and agaves are different plants, but just to keep in mind that readers may have different expectations and aloes may speak of the Mediterranean a bit more. And yeah, so that's the sort of thing you wind up doing. It's really On the case by case basis, how are readers are going to understand a specific phrase or words? Are the connotations different between a language and another? Yeah, there's no universal solution, really.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yelena, when you're writing for yourself, do you find that you have to make similar accommodations for your audience when you set something in the Adriatic or something like that?

Jelena:
Yes, I definitely do. I mean, for example, it's much easier if you are translating or even writing from one big culture to another. For example, with Cecile, it's from French to American or English. So you have big cultures who will probably understand each other's references, whereas I come from a very small culture and a small language. And so if I'm writing from a creation standpoint, then I always have to think about cultural references and I always have to worry about, you know, including things into my text in the way that but my readers will understand them. But also, you know, finding a balance between info dumping or explaining too much and on the other hand, avoiding using your own culture as an embellishment, as an ornament, you know, just to make it more diverse or more interesting or exotic. I hate that word, but people use it. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Jelena:
there's no, you know, and. I'm sure that, you know, for example, in my stories and in my books, there are cultural references which I'm sure many readers won't even pick up. And I am completely fine with that. I think that my task is that this lack of knowledge on their side doesn't make the rest of the story obscure for them. So to those who see the cultural references, that will be an interesting detail. And for those who don't, I just hope there will be like interesting details that enhance the immersion into text, basically. So there is there is this balance I'm always trying to find.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Would you say that there's an educative tendency when you are trying to include your culture? Do you want people to learn a little bit about Croatia and Croatian?

Jelena:
Obviously, yes, because, you know, otherwise, I wouldn't be writing stories and books setting creation and using, you know, Slavic and creation mythology and history. So, obviously,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, that's lovely.

Jelena:
there is, you know, well, I won't say need, but a tendency to, you know, introduce people to something new. But also, I am very. aware of the fact that even when readers say that they want something new or something different, it can't be too new or too different. So you always have to adapt in a way.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, understood. Floris, when you are writing from a Dutch perspective, how much finagling do you have to do to get your culture across? Do you find

Floris Kleijne:
Um...

Deborah L. Davitt:
that there's a barrier or do you find that it's easy?

Floris Kleijne:
Well, the way I started using my own cultural background and country in my fiction was that I was basically I switched to English writing to get access to market because there's no market in Holland. So English was my way into publication. And my first reflex was to actually transfer all my stories to an American setting. So I've written

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
stories taking place in Manhattan and places that I'm not at all familiar with. God bless Google Street View. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I do the same thing if it helps at

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah,

Deborah L. Davitt:
all, because I will sit there and I will zoom

Floris Kleijne:
exactly.

Deborah L. Davitt:
in on Google Street View and go, this is a place I have never been in my life, but I can make it authentic as hell by just saying that there's a water

Deborah L. Davitt:
tower at the corner of Seventh and Main.

Floris Kleijne:
exactly.Totally out of scope of this conversation, but I should tell you guys at some point about how my editor turned out to live somewhere. Nevermind.

Deborah L. Davitt:
HAHAHA

Floris Kleijne:
I was kind of trying to make my stories culturally aligned with my target audience. And at some point, an editor said, but wait, you're from Holland, why don't you use your background? And I said, Oh, that could be kind of cool. So I basically, I'd written a story taking place in Seattle. I'd been to Seattle for the first change. And they said, well, you're European, you're Dutch, go and put it there. And so I rewrote it to Rotterdam, which is like 60 miles from my home. And it was a great experience to be able to use something I know very well. And I really didn't

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
bother with bringing it across with more effort than I did before. Like Cecile and Julien and Alibais both say is a If the reader wants to know more, there's Google. And there's Google Maps, and there's all kinds of sources. But I believe that the background, the cultural background of the story and the setting of the story should serve the story. But I'm not at all inclined to be educational about it.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay.

Floris Kleijne:
I want to bring my story to cause, not teach my readers about my country. Not at all.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay,

Floris Kleijne:
So I just.

Deborah L. Davitt:
fair enough.

Floris Kleijne:
I use the setting, I use the background. And if you learn something from it, great. And if you don't, thanks for enjoying my story. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Excellent. Speaking of editors, how do you deal with an editor who wants to change your authorial voice? Because this is something that happens periodically where they want to change your word choice, your diction, your tone. This happens to all authors, but I imagine that there are certain pitfalls for people who are coming out of a different language just to begin with. And I'll start with Cecile this time. Have you ever encountered this as a problem or have editors been more willing to... give you latitude and understand that you do come from a different place.

Cecile:
Well, actually it's never been a problem because so far I've been lucky, I've dealt with very understanding editors and they were willing to discuss word choices and things like that. I mean, the fact is I'm not
a native English speaker, so if someone tells me that, for example, I used the wrong preposition somewhere, prepositions

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
in English for the record, they are hell, I don't know. Okay, not for that idea, they are absolute hell. So I still make mistakes and they are legitimate mistakes, not word choices. So, well, I'm pretty grateful to have editors pick on that and help improve my stories. That being said, it's something I have noticed in the past, but people tend to have different reactions to my... writing when

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
they know I'm not a native speaker. Like if they

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Cecile:
don't know, if it's completely anonymous, usually they end up assuming I'm British because I use

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
British spellings. And that's apparently the most salient thing about my writing. If they know I'm French, they are going to be more inclined to correct the grammar, things like that. So far with editors, it's always been a positive experience. because when it came to actual stylistic choices, now they never, I've never been asked to change something I had deliberately put there. And if it's just a common preposition, you know, fair enough. But yes, with readers, though the experience has been at times a bit stranger. Like I remember this one reader who said, Your grammar is wrong. And can I have an example of something to fix? And I don't have anything specific in mind, but you could just reach Trunk and White. It's all in there. All right.

Floris Kleijne:
Exactly, yeah.



Deborah L. Davitt:
that has happened to me and I'm a native speaker of English and I've had readers go, you obviously meant refugees and you put down refuges. I'm like, no, I meant refuges. Because all these characters are taking refuge in something. They're not refugees. There's a completely different use of the

Floris Kleijne:
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
very similar word, but I really did mean what I said I meant.

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
So it can happen to anybody, so yeah.

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah, I recognize what you say, Cecile, because that's, it's more prediscial thing than a language thing, I think. The one thing that one time that happened to me was when I was on Critter, Critter when it still existed. Does it still exist? Critter?


Deborah L. Davitt:
I think it does.

Floris Kleijne:
Well, I did a brief foray into Critter territory. And I submitted a story for critique. And one of the critiques I got back was, well, my young man, you have a lot to learn. It was very condescending. You

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, lovely

Floris Kleijne:
have a lot to learn, it's not your native language, and blah, blah. And all the examples he pointed out were just authorial voice or style or characters saying things. So I came back with, well, this was actually when I had already had two stories in the Writers of Future Anthologies. So I kind of snarkily came back to him  and said, well, these are my credits. Could it be about style? and then he shut up. But

Deborah L. Davitt:
haha

Floris Kleijne:
this was because he knew I was a non-native speaker European. And I'm pretty sure that if I had been English, or had faked being English, he wouldn't have responded like that. And so far, in my experience, editors haven't noticed at all.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I have definitely had a British copy editor come after me for word choice and I went back up to the main editor and said, look, I'm American. We do use language differently. If you want me to rewrite the entire story into British English, that's not going to happen. I will withdraw the story. And he said, no, we're not asking you to do that. So yeah, it's a whole thing even inside of English, one continent

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
to another. Yelena, have you encountered anything like this?

Jelena:
Well, I've worked with great editors, so I don't have any bad experience. What I don't like, and it's getting rarer now, is italicizing the foreign words. This is one thing that I don't like. For example, if you, I use a lot of Italian in my stories for some reason because they're usually set in Italy. Although I'm Croatian. But

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hmm.

Jelena:
sometimes I will use Italian words and editors will italicize them. And I don't like that. And there's also something that I've noticed which might not be, you know, a stylistic or editorial thing, but it does happen sometimes. And that's the tone of stories. And I've noticed with American editors and American magazines that they. tend to prefer more uplifting or more, how should I say it, less ambiguous stories. This is my personal

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hmm.

Jelena:
experience. I might be completely wrong here because there are some very dark magazines in the US. But still, I see this general tendency of, you know, rejecting stories which are sad. or ambiguous or melancholic and that might just be the type guys that might not be editorial thing but it's just something that I've noticed.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hmm, interesting. All right, so let's shift slightly and talk about not so much grammar pitfalls, but do you find that you unconsciously mirror the grammar structure of your native language when you're speaking or writing in English? Is that something that is a struggle for you, or do you  find that you're just so proficient in English that you're able to avoid that?

Cecile:
No, it does happen. To me, it's more of a positive thing.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
It's not so much the grammar, it's the rhythm of the language.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
Like, so in English, especially, well, in poetry,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
classical, classic English poetry is in I am big pentameters, right? I

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm,

Cecile:
am. So it's a binary rhythm. Very often, ternary rhythms are, well, they exist. but they are less common. In French, it would be the opposite. We tend to use a ternary rhythm. So when I write, every so often, I want to write a sentence that sounds nice to me, and I'm going to fall back into that ternary rhythm. To me, it sounds much more musical, much more pleasing, but that's probably because of my native language. And, but actually I... I like it. I mean, if it's something

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
I have that makes my prose perhaps a little bit different or something, I don't want to... This is not something I want to erase. I don't want to train myself to do ionic pentameters or whatever. Well, I'm not good at poetry anyway, but yes,

Cecile:
I think there is this natural rhythm to the language. Outside of a drama, you know what I mean. And yes, I think even when I speak or write in English, it's the rhythm of French that tends to come out very often.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Well, I think that your prose sings, so everything

Cecile:
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I've read of yours has sung. So I love the rhythm and the cadence writing. So keep doing exactly what you're doing. Be you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
By all means go.

Cecile:
I was just going to talk about grammar a little bit, but yeah, grammar not so much. And vocabulary, the interesting thing between English and French is that there is so much in common, but a lot of words have changed meanings in

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh yes.

Cecile:
one language or both. And so every so often, I tend to use, I'm going to use a word that is reasonably common in French. And it turns out to be very uncommon in English. And so I've had readers say, okay, I had to look up that word, but it exists, but I had to look it up. I just say, well, okay, fine. So people are just going to think I speak absolutely perfect, excellent English, when in fact I'm just speaking halfway between English and French. And yeah, sometimes it, well, sometimes I do miss the mark. Like I use a word. because I'm absolutely convinced that it has the same meaning in English and in French. And in fact, the word exists in English, but has a completely different meaning. So my sentences can end up a bit strange, perhaps.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Cognates are the bane of my existence. When I was taking Anglo-Saxon and I was translating Beowulf way back in college, I ran into the word Brun, which in German means brown. And I of course

Cecile:
Hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
went, okay, it's a brown sword. It must have blood on it or something like that. And my professor very calmly took me aside and said, you can't rely on cognates. That actually means

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
dark. It's a dark blade. I don't know, ah, okay, but because I recognize so many cognates out of German in Anglo-Saxon, it was just reflexive to reach for the first word that I knew that something meant. So that is a whole translation thing in and of

Cecile:
Exactly.

Deborah L. Davitt:
itself.

Cecile:
I mean, in some cases it can end up with surprising or interesting results. So it's the same. It's not really something I want to erase from the way I write. I mean, sometimes maybe I'm going to have to rewrite a sentence because I just plainly used the wrong word. And sometimes it's going to end up with something I wasn't quite intending. but that sounds good nonetheless. So yeah, I think it's actually something you can use when you write. It's not just a handicap. It's something you

Deborah L. Davitt:
No,

Cecile:
can

Deborah L. Davitt:
it's

Cecile:
use.

Deborah L. Davitt:
a... yeah. Absolutely. Floris and Yelena, the unconscious mirroring of grammar structures from your native language when you're writing in English. Do you find this a superpower the way Cecile does?

Floris Kleijne:
I don't do it at all, I think. I mean, I've never

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hehehe.

Floris Kleijne:
been caught at it anyway. But there's something else that I find interesting about grammar structure and what Thesil said about rhythm because I've written in both English and Dutch and I've translated in both directions. And what I found is two remarkable things about the difference between the languages. One is that... I love English because it has so many more words for things, which

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm.

Floris Kleijne:
is a challenge when translating back to Dutch. And there's also a lot of freedom in creating compound composite words on the fly

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
without breaking the flow of the language in which Dutch doesn't have at all. Very cumbersome and ugly and long and unpronounceable compound words. So that's one aspect that's very remarkable. and which helps when writing in English and really requires adjustment when writing in Dutch. And I've also found that the rhythm and flow of the languages are entirely different.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Floris Kleijne:
And I write for rhythm as much as for content. Almost

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
literally, I write not just the story, but I also want it to be able to be read out loud. and

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Floris Kleijne:
smoothly and any good story has like a B to it. There

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
are points at which you can end a paragraph or a chapter and points that you can absolutely not end the paragraph or a chapter. And all those things are very different between the languages, which means that the moment when I struggle most with the grammar and the grammar structure is when I'm translating from one to the other, because

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
it requires like paragraph level restructuring. to get

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Floris Kleijne:
rhythm, which also results in an inevitable huge difference in my authorial voice in Dutch or in English, because the languages support different types of rhythm and different types of flow somehow.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Floris Kleijne:
And I've never had much trouble with the English rhythm and flow and grammar, nor with Dutch, because that's my native language. and English is basically the second language around us in this country. Like it's on TV, people, including

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne:
myself, read a lot in English, music, TV shows. I mean, there's a lot of English around us. So picking up on this language is fairly easy, I would say. But adjusting to this difference in the two languages and switching between the two. I mean, my first novel, which came out in 2021. My publisher asked me to translate because they knew I could do both. They asked me to translate the first chapters for the international market, for sales. And I had, I mean, this novel in Dutch was pretty much polished in terms of rhythm and structure and style and the beats of the chapters and the beats of the scenes. And I really had to work it to get the same or an approximation of the same thing. in the English versions of the chapters, that was a very, very interesting challenge. More so than with short stories even, because, well, length and the complexity of the structure at novel level. So that's what my experience is that especially in the transition between the two, the differences make life difficult and interesting. Let's put it that way.

Deborah L. Davitt:
All right,

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yelena?

Jelena:
Yeah, I think basically the floor is spot on here because, and that's the reason why I hate translating my own stuff, because I never get the rhythm right. Basically Croatian and English are two very, very different languages with very different rules.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Jelena:
And for example, Croatian is a heavily inflected language, which means that you can say

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Jelena:
more with pure words. So which eliminates many short tiny little words that you have to use in English, which basically makes it less cluttered in a way. And, you know, I'm not trying to be, you know, derogative or anything, but it's, for example, in poetry, it becomes very handy because you end up with shorter and

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Jelena:
more elegant sentences in a way. So with English, it's sometimes more difficult because you simply need more words to say things. And also...

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh yes.

Floris Kleijne:
Don't try Dutch then because they need even more words in Dutch.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha!

Jelena:
And also, I mean, there were some things, there were some big differences in grammar I had to get used to when using English. For example, I mean, there are some very obvious things. For example, in Croatian, we don't have articles. We don't have definite or indefinite articles. We don't use them, so you don't need them. So I still like,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Jelena:
when I use articles,

Floris Kleijne:
Oh, you're very moving, yes.

Jelena:
I still have to think about it, like, oh, does this need an article? And for example, we don't see passive voice as something bad in writing. In Croatian, you know, passive is

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Jelena:
just a voice. Adverbs are just adverbs. the sequence of tenses is not so strict. We don't have reported speech in the same way that the English does. So, I mean, the rules are very different. And basically, when I write in English, or even when I translate, and that's why I hate translating myself, I have to start from scratch if I'm doing it. So, because nothing that I used in a stylistic or a rhythmical way will apply to English text. So you have to start anew. And it's especially difficult if you're trying to make your short stories sing or if you're trying to write poetry.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Jelena:
In those cases, I almost never translate my own work. I'd rather, you know, start writing from scratch than trying to translate and basically destroy the piece.

Floris Kleijne:
I think that

Deborah L. Davitt:
the subject

Floris Kleijne:
applies

Deborah L. Davitt:
of poetry.

Floris Kleijne:
even more in Flash. I've translated my own work, but Flash is almost impossible because in Flash it's even more concentrated

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mmm.

Floris Kleijne:
words doing three jobs at once and rhythm and structure being of the utmost importance, et cetera. So bringing that to a new language, I've done it twice. I don't want to do it again.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah

Floris Kleijne:
It hurts.

Jelena:
And also

Floris Kleijne:
It's

Jelena:
that...

Floris Kleijne:
painful.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I was going to just say, I was just going to say that on the terms of poetry, I haven't translated poetry, but I have used forms from other languages, and I can definitely tell you that English is not meant to go into, say, Irish forms. It is just not meant to go into there. The language does not fold down very well into the Irish forms or the Welsh forms because it... just the grammar and where the emphasis is, is just so different. And it's a challenge and I love the challenge and I relish trying to do it, but it is extremely difficult. So


Deborah L. Davitt:
I understand exactly where you're coming from on that.

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah, I was a footnote, Jelena, by the way, I think we need and everyone, I think we need a separate podcast on why passive voice is not bad.

Jelena:
I agree.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Jelena:
And also...

Deborah L. Davitt:
I didn't know what passive voice was until I hit college and I had a college professor go through one of my papers saying, passive voice, passive voice, passive voice, passive voice, and I was like, I didn't know this was a bad thing. The words convey the meaning

Floris Kleijne:
Exactly.

Deborah L. Davitt:
that I was trying to get across. Why is this bad?

Jelena:
And also the verb

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah.

Jelena:
to be is just an auxiliary verb. It has its meaning and it has its place and I don't know

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes!

Jelena:
why you hate it so much, but you do.

Floris Kleijne:
Exactly. Yeah. How can

Deborah L. Davitt:
I

Floris Kleijne:
sadism

Deborah L. Davitt:
think it is...

Floris Kleijne:
be bad to be

Jelena:
Hahaha

Floris Kleijne:
not bad?

Deborah L. Davitt:
To be or not to be is a perfectly good sentence, and Shakespeare is famous for having written it.

Floris Kleijne:
Exactly, there you go. And his editor would have said, come on William, can you use different verb the next...

Jelena:
Make the words work for you, you know, don't just use the verb to be.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Right. Dealing with readers. When you're reading, when you're doing a public reading of your work in English, do you find that readers are inclined to go along with you and give you the acceptance that you deserve and that you're due? Or conversely, if you have somebody else do the reading for you, say for a podcast or an audiobook, how do you deal with them as they sound out foreign to them words? because I'm sure that is a whole thing. I have dealt, as I mentioned on the last podcast, I've had something of mine podcasted and there was no back and forth. There was no review by me to make sure that the right words were said. And they wound up sending out a text to the narrator that had bad sentences in it, that they were supposed to have been edited out and I had edited out. And so, they instead had stubs and things like that. So that was painful to listen to for me. So how do you wind up dealing with narrators for podcasts and just reading in public  as a whole? And I'm gonna go back to Cecile since she hasn't had a chance to talk yet in a while. 

Cecile:
Well, I haven't had a chance to do public reading yet. I'll let you know how that goes if I do one.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay.

Cecile:
For podcasts, well, I had a brief exchange with the narrator about the pronunciation of, well, of propronounce in particular. I have to admit, it sounds strange to my ears when I hear someone... read my stories in English and they pronounce

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
French nouns with a strong English accent. I mean, obviously

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh God.

Cecile:
it's not wrong, right? They're speaking in English. But to me, it sounds, it probably shows them in a strange kind of halfway space when I write. Like I write in English, but most

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
of the time, I mean, in my daily life, I speak French with my family, with my friends. So English is something I use when I write or with my students in class.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
So my brain functions mostly in French. But the thing is, it's also because I think proper nouns in many stories, they are the place where the culture really manifests itself, if that

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Cecile:
makes sense. Like, I mean, it's... It's a bit of a tangent, but also maybe not completely. You know that Tolkien, when he gave instructions to translators, when the Lord

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Cecile:
of the Rings became really popular, he gave explicit instructions to translators and said, well, since the names of the hobbits are all supposed to be translated from the hobbit language, then you should translate those names into whatever language you're using. And so, for example, in French, Bilbo Baggins has become 
Bilbon Sacke. And the big problem, I think that, I mean, I absolutely understand the intention. And while talking with a language nerd, so I can forgive him anything, no problem. But the thing he hadn't taken into account was the fact that the hobbits, well, they are English. They look English. They sound English.

Cecile:
Yes, they act like English people from the countryside. They do not sound like French people at all. And I mean,


Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm

Cecile:
I suppose to me it sounds really strange because I'm from South France, so the difference is quite important, I suppose. somebody from the north of France, I mean, why not? You know, rolling hills and damp weather, and it's a bit closer to the UK. But just imagine a Japanese translation of the Lord of the Rings with Japanese names. I mean, that wouldn't sound right. Or, you know, a Moroccan translation, a Spanish translation, whatever. That wouldn't sound right at all. So, and... I mean, I think it was reading the Lord of the Rings and just trying to change the names in my head when I read, because it sounds so horrendous, honestly. Frodon, Sake, Tumy, that wasn't right at all.


Cecile:
And I think that's one of the things that made me realize, it made me realize that when you use names in a story, they're not just, they are actually extremely important. They're not just words. They carry a part of the culture, of the setting and of

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Cecile:
everything. So that's why I always wish, in a way, that when someone reads my story, they would read the names with the French accent. I know that's not going to happen. It's not a big deal, but in my head, that's why it still matters a little bit.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to make so very sure that I was getting everyone's names right today is because it's a gesture of respect.

Cecile:
Indeed, yes. Thank you.

Floris Kleijne:
It's my experience

Deborah L. Davitt:
Uh...

Floris Kleijne:
with all podcast producers thus far that they always make a point of getting the name right, which I really appreciate a great deal. Other than that, my name? I really like that to be pronounced as it should be. Other than that, I'm not very particular.

Jelena:
I've

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yelena?

Jelena:
never met an English speaker who got my name right on the first attempt.

Floris Kleijne:
Hmm.

Jelena:
I usually just send them a sound clip. I just record the correct pronunciation

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Jelena:
and just send it to them. It's

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Jelena:
difficult to explain everything and try to send them guides and everything. So I think that my most positive experience was with BCS. And, you know, there's a really wonderful recording of my story there. And there's a lot of Italian, obviously, because it's set in Venice, a lot of Italian names in that story. And I just sent them a recording of myself reading those names. And it came out really wonderful.

Floris Kleijne:
Nice, well

Deborah L. Davitt:
I was in a position

Floris Kleijne:
done.

Deborah L. Davitt:
where I was, a story of mine recently recorded for Lightspeed and they were asking me how to pronounce certain names which came out of Afghanistan tribal languages and I'm like, your guess is as good as mine. I am not an expert here. But here's where I think the syllables line up. Here's where I think the stresses are. Let's try it this way and hopefully we don't offend anybody.

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Right, so do any of you have any recent projects that you'd like to talk about or anything new coming out soon?

Floris Kleijne:
Well, I could talk about my new novel, but for our audience here, it's not very useful because it's I'm basically I'm an English language short story writer and a Dutch novelist. So it's a Dutch novel. Sorry. And I'm also I'm also been kind of unfaithful to our genre because I'm a Dutch thriller writer. So my next book is coming out in January. It's done. We have to proof. We have the advanced review copies. It's coming out, I'm very excited about it. But nobody listening to this cares, that's sad. You care, you guys care, I'm sure.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Will you be doing a translation of the first chapters again or is that something you don't want to do again?

Floris Kleijne:
I'm gonna, yeah, last time they actually paid me for it and I hope to get them to do that again. So yeah, that's the plan. Absolutely,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay.

Floris Kleijne:
yeah. I do expect them to want to market it in outside the country again as well. So yeah, I don't see why not. So I'll definitely share that. Yeah,


Deborah L. Davitt:
So Cecile, do you have anything recent or anything new coming out? Or...

Cecile:
Well, I have a short story collection that's going to be released by Newcompress. So the exact date
has not been specified. But I'm quite excited about this, actually, because I write a lot about the environment, the relationship between humans and the earth, et cetera. And usually well, I tend to be a bit chatty. especially when I write.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah

Cecile:
And like I cannot possibly write flash. They always end up as 5,000 word stories after a couple of rounds 

Deborah L. Davitt:
You and me both.

Cecile:
of revisions. Yeah, so doing a good collection, you know, that was a great opportunity to put everything in there, everything I wanted to write, everything I wanted to say. And yes, it's going to be mostly about... the environment, a little bit of feminism, and with a lot of whales, because for some reason I write about whales all the time. And yes, I also got to write notes for the stories, so that it's more of a, well, it's not just short stories stacked on top of each other. I tried to think of this as a kind of long discourse. And

Deborah L. Davitt:
Interesting.

Cecile:
so I'm excited, as you can see.

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah.

Cecile:
Yeah, it was a really, really good thing to work on.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Could you repeat the title of the collection, please?

Cecile:
So the title is Elephants in Bloom, and it's going

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay.

Cecile:
to be released by Newcom Press.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Alright.

Jelena:
Okay, oh,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Jelena, I think you've got a novel coming out?

Floris Kleijne:
Oh, I totally want to read that.

Jelena:
I do in a month time on September the 19th, I have my debut novel in English. I've already published one novel in Croatian, but that doesn't count, as Floris said, because nobody's going to read that one. But no, this one is called Darkwoods Deep Water, and it will be published by Ghost Orchid Press in the UK. And it's a blend of dark fantasy and Gothic horror. And it's a novel set. Yeah. And it's a novel, it's set in the secondary world, but it was influenced by the history of Eastern Adriatic, which is the place where I live, and Slavic folklore. So I think it will be, I'm actually very interested to see how the readers will react to this one, because it's written, it was written in English originally, so it's not a translation. But it's a translation of. culture of sorts, because I was writing about my own history and my own culture and, you know, my own mythology and things like that. So it's, in a way, it's a strange mixture of, you know, something written in English language, but with themes from another culture. And I am very curious to see how Doritos will respond to that.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Sounds fascinating.

Cecile:
It's very good, by the way.

Jelena:
Thank you!

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, you've already read it?

Cecile:
Yes, I have and it's excellent.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, wonderful!

Floris Kleijne:
I want both of them on my nightstand.

Deborah L. Davitt:
It sounds like a fantastic set of things to read. I would love if you would send them to me. I'm drowning in stuff to read for the podcast anyways, but let's add more to the pile

Jelena:
No problem.

Deborah L. Davitt:
if you wouldn't mind.

Floris Kleijne:
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Right. Thank you all for having been a part of this episode. It was a delight speaking with all of you. Next week on Shining Moon, we'll switch subjects to the topic of writing role-playing games with special guest, Aaron Aviram. I'm gonna start this one entirely over and we're gonna edit this one out. Next week on Shining
Moon, we'll switch subjects to the topic of writing role-playing games with special guest, Erun Aviram of Crystal Hearts. See you all next time. Thank you so much.

Cecile:
Thank you.

Floris Kleijne:
Yeah, it was great.